Chad Willis

“Quality” Traffic?

Quick note: traffic = people/visitors/users that are sent to a website

Throughout the online marketing industry, especially in affiliate marketing, advertisers and affiliates alike put a massive emphasis on sending quality traffic to their products. So, what makes some traffic “good” and other traffic “bad”?

There are a myriad of factors that go into determining the quality of traffic, but the answer to one simple question will sum it up: does this traffic benefit everyone involved?

As we all know, people get into affiliate marketing to make money. Advertisers don’t run charities, they’re not just doling out money to any affiliate who can fire their conversion pixel, they need a return on their investment.

eHarmony, a top-tier advertiser in the affiliate space, pays $8 per registration that an affiliate can send to their site. After signing up, the eHarmony user is offered to purchase a premium monthly subscription for $25/month. Affiliate X sends 100 leads to eHarmony, costing them $800, but none of his leads end up converting to sales for them. Now eHarmony is out $800, and they blacklist Affiliate X from running their offer again.

Affiliate marketing is no different from life. No matter how you slice and dice it, you must provide value in order to receive value.

In our example, Affiliate X was sending terrible quality traffic, because the advertiser made $0 in return for their $800 spend.

It’s obvious that the traffic was untargeted, from unapproved sources (eHarmony is a mainstream dating site, they don’t want banner traffic from porn sites), or possibly fraudulently incentivized.

Advertisers aren’t obligated to put up with this either. If they can detect that the traffic an affiliate’s sending won’t be profitable for them, they can pause, or stop, his traffic. The affiliate, unless the traffic was fraudulent, will still be paid but he most likely won’t be able to run any of that advertiser’s offers again. Or, if the advertiser has a CPS version of their CPL offer, they can switch him on to that to ensure they won’t get burned on future traffic.

If Affiliate X were to send traffic to eHarmony that converted on their backend and was profitable for them, X would be sending quality traffic, which is almost always rewarded by advertisers.

If X’s traffic was “backing out” (profitable for the advert), he would most likely get higher payouts (a raise from $8/lead to $10/lead), faster payment terms (weekly Net 7 instead of monthly Net 30), and maybe custom landing pages that could further improve his conversion rate.

Focusing on a win-win relationship with your advertiser or affiliate is the key to success in affiliate marketing.

I will detail in another post on how to improve your traffic quality, so you can start getting massive pay bumps, daily payouts, and VIP treatment from the people you work with.